Like this:

Related

5 Responses

A lot of people seem more comfortable with the spoken word than with the written word. They try to write in the way that they talk, and their spelling is often based on how things sound… lots of mistakes based on things sounding the same, but different: “your” vs. “you’re”, “to”, “two”, “too”.

IRONICALLY when they write in the way that they talk, they miss diction– that which dictates punctuation. Run-on sentences… but they would NEVER read that sentence with no pauses. They also have never been taught that when in doubt, use a period, i.e. a full stop. This would eliminate many errors with commas– when they separate sentences that are NOT clauses with a comma! They don’t know, is that bad? <— NO, it's "They don't know. Is that bad?" These people need to learn how punctuation dictates pauses– and read their sentences aloud EXACTLY as such so they realize how ridiculous it sounds!

Mostly though, I believe these rules are for the benefit of individuals that don't speak a language natively; Spanish speakers don't have quite as many problems as English ones, I think, but boy, they really love to forget about punctuation entirely– wow, the run-on sentences… and that's hard for me to read.